His posthumous novel Silverview was published in 2021. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, appeared in 2017. At the end of the Cold War, le Carré widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5&6). When I first read the book 35 () years ago I recall being a little disappointed that the book wasn't more Smiley-centric, but in retrospect le Carre's shift in focus from treachery within the Circus to the exotic East was what the series needed. At sixteen he found refuge at the university of Bern, then later at Oxford. After Tinker, Tailor, le Carre's fans waited many years for the follow-up The Honourable Schoolboy. The son of a confidence trickster, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age.
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